


Pink Ravens Will Peck Us to Shreds

by ksbcml



Category: Winner (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 15:22:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6525649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ksbcml/pseuds/ksbcml
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Taehyun can see the world is lights, paints, blue-and-green round pills and compulsive sex with strangers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pink Ravens Will Peck Us to Shreds

He remembers the first words Mino uttered to him. That was in the gallery, he was standing in front of one of Taehyun's paintings. Looking at it carefully, he said, You have beautiful emotions, mister Nam. I very much enjoy your emotions. In this first instant, Mino was just a man of whom nothing was visible in the dim light but his pitch-black hair and the aquiline contours of his face.

Sometimes he remembers events only by the colours of their details.

Mino’s hair pitch-black. His skin dusky caramel. His signet-ring glittering silver.

He appeared at the next exhibition as well. Taehyun saw him stopping in front of every painting and leaning his head to the left and to the right as if to get a better view. He looked very concentrated, that’s what Taehyun thought.

Things aren’t either happy or sad, are they.

Fast-forward to the banquet, from behind his glass of champagne, Mino asked him, How does it feel to be a young promising painter. The thing about his smile was that only one corner of his lips was raised. He had poise and confidence, that’s what Taehyun judged. And he liked his eyes, cool, sedate but also with a mischievous twinkle.

Fast-forward three years and maybe Taehyun remembers the day of his birthday only because that’s their bank account password. They share one bank account, one house, one car, one bathroom and one bed in which he should be at nights. But he isn’t.

When he comes back home at four o’clock in the morning, he doesn’t remember a thing, or he remembers only some vague details. It’s four in the morning or three in the morning and him sitting in the kitchen, his hair splotched with orange paint and the orange paint is adhered to his skin.

At some point he hesitates whether he can feel any emotions. Did they all vanish away. Are they constantly disappearing and he cannot stop the process.

We’re not able to go on until you make it clear you have problems and you need help. Mister Nam.

Against a huge backdrop of exploding lights, Taehyun strips off his coat, then his jacket. The spirals, frills and furbelows of lurid colours are casted on his figure as he undoes the buttons of his white shirt, lets it slide down his shoulders and fall on the floor with no sound. The lights proliferate, diminish, reappear and disappear on Taehyun’s pale skin. So vivid and intense he has to squeeze his eyes shut. The fireworks of blue, green, violet and yellow eddy and twirl on the backdrop and on Taehyun’s body when he slips his trousers off his hips and skinny legs, then his briefs.

Nowadays so many people are called artists it’s humiliating to be considered one of them. He said that during their first or second date in a pricey restaurant.

Xanax, Percocet, get to know each other. Tramadol, Vicodin, it’ll help you for sure. Lorazepam and Valium. The whole family.

But I would call that a painting. Wouldn’t you.

The first time Taehyun saw him in the daylight, a thought crossed his mind if the man's nipples and cock are the same dark colour as his lips. Right before they started talking about art and What painting means to you, blah-blah.

Now, the worst part about being Mino’s boyfriend is that Mino tries to help him so badly but what Taehyun can feel is nothing related to gratitude.

It’s just like scratching a mosquito bite. You know it’s pleasant although later on it’s going to itch you even more. It swells, gets bigger and more red, it becomes a skin deformation with pulsing erythema. It feels good and you scratch more and as you scratch more, you can’t stop doing so. The only thing you want is to make this moment last eternally. And as you scratch, the skin ruptures, and as you keep on scratching, you scratch it off. You collect blood under your nails, but you don’t mind. You continue scratching, now in the wetness, in the soft sticky tissue, in the meat, in the ectoplasm of your own body. But as long as it feels so damn good, you don’t bother.

What is the thing you are scared about the most. That I cannot be the first in anything. That whatever I do is just recycling. That there are no first times left for me.

All he knows is that he’s already naked and they are going to do it. And he doesn’t want to call this cheating.

A question asked to the interviewees, some gay website where everyone has nicknames like thickdick233 or rimming18. Why do you like being fucked. One of the answers, random order, he enjoys feeling all the veins and curves of a man’s cock inside. Another one, he enjoys feeling a man's semen dripping down his thighs. He enjoys how his muscles clench around the dick, involuntarily and repeatedly, out of his control.

Sorry, Mino. Sorry, God.

The last ten minutes before the end of the world and he's stuck in them. Every single night he dreams of the ends of the world in his myriad delta waves. Large quantities of delta waves every single night.

Let’s start from the dreams, mister Nam. Tell me about your dreams.

Still the same website. Some guy says that there is nothing better than to have a thick hairy cock in your mouth full of saliva. Another answer, he particularly likes the feel of balls bouncing back and forth against his buttocks. Another guy enjoys being penetrated with a toy or phallic object. Nothing human can be alien to me, huh.  


He arranges them in a row, behind the doors of the mirrored bathroom cabinet. Those small bottles with what is inside written on their colourful tallies. Xanax. Percodan. Vicodin. He knows that Mino is watching him from a few steps distance. He’s silhouetted in the open doorway, his arms crossed, his back hunched. Taehyun knows he’s angry but trying not to show it.

How can you not be angry. How can you not go nuts.

During their third or fourth date, Mino asked him, How would you define love. It took him a couple of minutes before he answered. Let’s say that it’s this hardly noticeable sensation that you would like to see the other person still sleeping in the morning right after you open your eyes. A feeling so vague as a tickle at the back of your throat. That you would like to see this person waking up every single day.

Mino had an unlit cigarette between his teeth when his lips curled to smile. Then, taking the cigarette out, he said, A genre of stubbornness. He said, There are thousands of millions of people all around the world and yet there is no way you could want somebody else. Just this one person. You don’t want to see this person go away.

Real art. Listen, this is real art.

He imagines himself lying in a circle of orange paint which hasn’t dried yet. He as the radius of the circle, with his hair wet with paint and his clothes soaked in paint and so heavy they’re dragging him to the floor.

There is no God and no Heaven. Nothing lives after its death.

And when you’re dying, there is no multimedia presentation of your existence, twenty two years in five minutes of your heart being turned off. You die and that’s it. You’re just gone.

The answers given by the interviewees and some of them want group sex as the only person receiving. Six or seven cocks, one after another, so fast there is barely time for the semen to pour out from the ass.

His gaze flickers over all of them, before they begin. The first guy, the second, the seventh.

What are the ten signs of being a sexual compulsive. It’s just hypothetical. I’m not suggesting anything.

Sorry, Mino. Sorry, God.

When they had sex for the very first time, Taehyun imagined that they were lying on a wooden theatrical stage, bathed in all five or six strobe lights pointed directly at them. No scenography, no props, just their naked bodies. Naked and beaded with sweat, with his head thrown back, he imagined that rows of nobodies enshrouded in gloom were watching them have sex on the stage. With Mino pinned to the floor, bouncing on his dick, he imagined that his every single whimper and every single scream was heard by this large audience filling the seats in front of the stage. Nothing more was to be heard than him moaning and the skin slapping because the audience was fully concentrated, not even a single rustle of a plastic bag. They were all contemplating the act, contemplating him riding Mino’s cock up and down and waiting for the right moment to clap. Plaudits.  


The problem is every time he pulls out, Taehyun feels empty. Empty. So empty. Itching from the inside to be filled again.

There is one thing for you to understand. You have to wake up. If you don’t wake up, we can’t go on.

I just feel like all my emotions will always be second-hand. Thoughts that cross my mind always already worn out by somebody else.

I’ll never know if the person I love and the person who loves me is the same guy.

What do you think Mino can feel. I need you to speak.

There are pink ravens chasing me.

Fast-forward to now and Taehyun is lying on a sofa, still naked and covered with sweat after sex with another stranger. He drops a pill into the empty vacuum of his throat and washes it down with a gulp of alcohol. Rewind. He drops a pill and washes it down with alcohol. Rewind. He drops a pill, washes it down.

He has finished swallowing the pills and there are no more left in the bottle he holds in his left hand. He slams the bottle down, onto the concrete floor. You know, he says faintly, My boyfriend’s at home and he’s probably worried about where I am. He says, He has to be very scared that something bad might have happened to me.

This guy is a photographer and his atelier is a huge concrete hall.

This guy walking across the huge concrete hall, he goes, Fucked up, man, that’s fucked up.

There is a trick guys always love watching Taehyun perform, meaning how he drinks alcohol through a plastic straw. His wet lips sucking on it and his cheeks hollowing in the way you cannot avoid thinking of a blowjob.

This guy talking to the other end of the hall, he says, Being in a relationship can really suck. And his voice reverberates off the walls.

Scientifically proven, when drinking through a straw you drink more alcohol in a shorter period of time. Call that physics.

All these guys he met because one guy he’d already fucked with told another guy and this another guy told others too.

There is an enormously big window through which the sun shines. And pink ravens. Pink ravens are behind the window. Pinned to the sky with their wings spread but not moving, motionless. This daylight pouring all over the hall is filtrated by a thousand ragged clouds of dust. The closer the light gets to the sofa on which Taehyun is lying the more dulled it becomes. Smoke and dust is all the air smells like.

Do me harder. His stream of consciousness being stopped by the orgasm, first, second, third.

When Taehyun comes back home and doesn’t remember a damn thing, all Mino wants is for him to do a blood test. Let them examine it. Who do you worry about. Me. Or yourself. What do you want to prove.

I didn’t say that. I just want you to do a blood test. Is there anything wrong about it.

God had to be very content after he had made that, huh. On the seventh day, he snapped his fingers and said, What a fucking good job. After he had created nuclear power plant explosion and violent earthquakes. After he had polished Cholera, Sporotrichosis and Tuberculosis, with his fists planted on his hips, he looked around and around and said, Jolly good. Voila.

The interviewees just like him, those with asses so tight they suck condoms in.

The moment they find themselves lying on the floor, panting and breathing heavily, Taehyun starts thinking about Mino. The moment after they both came, he and the stranger, is the moment he feels a little bit regretful.

Fast-backward to one September day when Mino led him to a door at the end of the corridor and opening it said, This is your atelier. With tenderness seeping into his raspy voice, I need you to paint us something beautiful. That day was soaked in rain and they tried to hear what was in the gushes of wind, what the gushes were trying to say out loud. Standing on the balcony and leaning on the railing, with his gaze riveted upon Taehyun’s face, Mino looked so serenely.

Three in the morning and the two of them dancing on the kitchen tiles illuminated by the nocturnal moonlight.

Fast-forward to the moment when you put a lightbulb between your teeth and bite into it. The lightbulb bursts and the pieces of glass cut through your gums. There is a lot of blood in your mouth and you can feel its metal taste on your tongue. You withdraw the bulb by pulling its screw cup. You let the glass debris slide down your chin with all your saliva and blood.

There is something about this blood. He notices it. The way it dries and how fast it lasts. In the mirror, he can see his own lips red as if he painted them with a lipstick.

Red lipstick.

Blood trickling down his neck is a crawly sensation over his skin. If not for the smarting gums, that would be a pleasant feeling. No painful connotations. Nothing to worry about.

Those pieces of glass are embedded underneath his skin, stuck in there, tiny and thin. How to pick the glass debris out without sticking it even deeper. How to remove it and not make it worse. He’s going to call somebody, but how long will it take.

Maybe you can fall in love but you can’t love. And that’s why when he looked at him with this worried expression on his face, checking the medical results and asking, Did you take your pills, Taehyun was so hollow inside. Like an empty cream container.

He asks him, Where have you been last night. He’s angry but he tries to repress it. He nervously runs his fingers through his pitch-black hair.

The best thing about having a riffle is that people around you are scared you’re gonna shoot them. That you’re gonna fucking kill them. Reasonably. Are you scared? Fair enough. Take your clothes off, all of them. No, you don’t have to fold them. Slow motion. One freeze-frame after another.

I will never be able to experience my first love again.

You suffer from delusions. You’re sick. Normal people don’t think about the things you do.

I will never be completely sure of what I feel and what I think.

Sorry, grandma. Sorry, God.

Taehyun makes a pistol with the fingers of his right hand, his thumb straight upward, his index and middle finger straight out, and aims at Mino. Mino says, It’s not loaded, but Taehyun bucks his hand three times imitating the kickback of a gun and making pshoo pshoo noises, one, two, three, three shots fired into Mino’s chest. Mino says, Blanks, you won’t kill anybody with blanks.

If Taehyun shot him, he would be bleeding with violet paint.

You have to surface, surface again. You had the sensation that you’re going to drown. But now you surface.

All those objects around, all furniture, carpets, clocks, chairs, newspapers, books, walls, floors and ceilings, everything drifts away, vanishes and ceases to exist. In the vacuum which is the residue of everything being gone, in this void, limbo, non-existence, the only things still existing is he, Mino and a dingy sofa with flower pattern.  


Taehyun stands in front of him and in front of the sofa.

They don’t look each other in the eyes and there is no sound.

Back to the room which is bathed in the lurid colours of explosions. Turquoise. Crimson. Cyan. Magenta. Coral. The lights are sliding down his skin, then the champagne bottles popping. Love me, love me, love me. Don’t leave, I cannot, I’m not able, please. The room submerged in dim lights, it appears as if reflected in thousands of mirrors of deep green water. He can hear pink ravens and classical music. Maybe it’s Tchaikovsky’s symphony no. 5 when the first digit is inserted. He moans, pants. There is no God and no Heaven, but there are definitely champagne and Valium interactions exploding inside of his body. Beethoven’s no. 9 when this guy rushes inside him, gripping on his thighs so harshly they go numb and white. That’s ludicrous, isn’t it. Mendelssohn’s no. 4, fourth movement, A minor, that’s when he begins to stroke Taehyun’s shaft. Or maybe when he grabs roughly at his hair. Or when he chokes him with his both sinewy hands. Make the safe word something simple, like “taco”. Same goes for the safe gesture. You know, stuff like gagging and not being able to speak.

This is how a bottle of Xanax must look like from the inside when you shake it hard to make it rattle.

And then she was already gone and he didn’t feel sorry even during her funeral. The only thing he can remember is how the wind was pulling at his long coat and that he was fidgeting with the white flower he was supposed to drop on the coffin but he didn’t.

Cold touches land on the skin of his bare back. That’s paint. The pink paint from those pink ravens soaring through the air. All around him is his dusty studio full of empty canvases hanging on the white walls and pink ravens humming and rustling with wings. He’s just a dainty pale figure crouched on the floor with his palms pressed to the sides of his head and his eyes squeezed shut.

Canvases are empty and so is his mind. The perspective is fading into the absolute nothingness which wants to envelope him in some way, tightly. He is or he isn’t. In his studio or not. It enveloped or it didn’t.

Talking with Mino again about the same thing, Taehyun imagines that the corridor is full of water, the water half wall high so that when Mino takes off his coat and hangs it on the hook its surface effervesces and sputters with drops. He imagines that everything is under the water and that they are both soaked. That the plastic console goes upward from the bottom and drifts on the surface, spouting dolefully near the wall. That the painting is half-submerged. That at least a dozen of empty plastic containers floats between their two silhouettes and that the long hairs of their carpet waves like brown alga at the sea bottom.

At the banquet, right after his painting exhibition, he finds himself lost in the crowd of elegant people wearing black suits, white shirts, black dresses and white shawls. In this crush of legs and arms he can barely breathe and all the air smells like is pungent perfumes. He takes a few steps and suddenly all those people are dead as if they’ve died just a single flicker of Taehyun’s eyelid ago. Their bodies fall down to the floor and they are all bleeding except that the blood is not blood, but rose-tinted paint.

In the hall of the gallery all of a sudden he is the only person alive. He and Mino coming from behind the wall of blank canvases.

Taehyun can feel his own lips moving and hear his own voice saying, So why are you a theatrical scenographer.

Mino stands in front of the piles of dead bodies bleeding with rose paint. He goes, My grandmother. She worked in a theatre. I used to spend there a lot of time when my parents weren’t at home. As I got older, I became a volunteer. You know, the cloakroom and checking people’s tickets. In exchange I could watch plays for free. I used to watch one play five or six times and each time was as fascinating as the first.

A flicker of an eyelid and Taehyun realises they are at home, they are sitting in the kitchen and the clock says it’s three in the morning.

Mino, sitting at the opposite side of the dinner table, he goes, Do you feel better now.

A flicker of an eyelid and Taehyun realises that he’s still sinking into the orange paint.

One exactly the same play five or six times in a row.

What position would he recommend. Doggie style. That’s a psychological thing. That’s about how submissive it is. Even if you want to get away, you cannot.  


Take it to the back of your throat. Some of the guys he met because one guy had told another guy and this another guy had told others too, they enjoy him gagging the most.

The point is he can put the whole blame on rushes of endorphins which can relieve him from all his problems, deliver him from his entire life. This is what makes him feel high. And those self-tests. Do you hide aspects of your sexual behaviour from your partner. When you have sex, do you feel depressed afterwards. Have you ever cruised public places seeking anonymous encounters with strangers. Have you had certain kinds of sex that later disgusted you when you thought back on them.  


Sweat. Glitter. Flash.

The worst part about being Mino’s boyfriend is that he probably, perhaps, maybe loves him back so much, but cannot bring himself to stop doing what he does.  


He took a sip from his glass of wine and said, We need to make something clear. Art is neither a hobby nor a job. You don’t do art because you enjoy it or because you’re good at it.

The disease.

The disorder.

Maybe some things you can’t leave not because you love them this much but because of how much time and effort you’ve put in them. Sometimes Taehyun likes to think he’s Mino’s best painting, his biggest and most time-consuming work. You don’t throw away your expensive properties, do you.

Mino tells him, I still want to see you waking up every morning, and Taehyun knows that what he means is I still love you.

Those three words so worn out and so second-hand, huh.

When Mino tells him, I want to see you waking up next to me, it always means love.

This guy’s voice reverberates off the walls, Fucked up, man, that’s fucked up.

You’re not crazy. I’ve never said that and never thought.

God, this hippie with a can of spray paint and a six-pack of dynamite, he scratched his spotty forehead and said, Good job, for fuck’s sake. This is how he finished creating the world. You know, art and so on.

What do you think Mino can feel. Because of me. The way I am. I imagine myself sinking into the orange circle of paint, deeper and deeper. It swallows me slowly. How did you feel when. Mouth wide open but no sound. I can’t bring myself to feel the way normal people do. What did you think about. I thought that perhaps, perhaps pink ravens will peck us to shreds. Have you ever. The way you cut your meal with a fork and knife in your shaking hands. This is how I felt. Between a fork and knife, naked and showered with feathers. Laughing or crying but no emotions at all. As far as I remember.

**Author's Note:**

> It is what it is.


End file.
